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Now You Can Rent a Robot Worker:
Polar Manufacturing has been making metal hinges, locks, and brackets in south Chicago for more than 100 years. Some of the company's metal presses—hulking great machines that loom over a worker—date from the 1950s. Last year, to meet rising demand amid a shortage of workers, Polar hired its first robot employee.
The robot arm performs a simple, repetitive job: lifting a piece of metal into a press, which then bends the metal into a new shape. And like a person, the robot worker gets paid for the hours it works.
Jose Figueroa, who manages Polar's production line, says the robot, which is leased from a company called Formic, costs the equivalent of $8 per hour, compared with a minimum wage of $15 per hour for a human employee. Deploying the robot allowed a human worker to do different work, increasing output, Figueroa says.
"Smaller companies sometimes suffer because they can't spend the capital to invest in new technology," Figueroa says. "We're just struggling to get by with the minimum wage increase."
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 19 2022, @11:51PM (3 children)
This is kind of the opposite of true. The cotton gin (of the American style) was invented in the 18th century and slave based cotton agriculture was developed around it. Slavery existed previously, of course, but the slaves were previously used for tobacco or sugar. It took the cotton gin to make even slave based cotton agriculture competitive with cotton from India, which had a different kind of fiber that was easier to process. It turns out that slavery isn't even that much of an economic benefit to anyone except the slave owner.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 20 2022, @01:55AM (1 child)
Only a benefit to the slaveowner? It allowed cotton to become a dominant part of the economy. So much was produced so cheaply that it was exported to the North and to Britain's vast textile mills which wove cloth for export to the rest of the world. The North benefitted tremendously as the textile mills fed by cheap domestic (Southern) cotton drove industrialization.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 21 2022, @12:45AM
Yes. The same production could have been achieved with paid labor, as evidenced by the fact that that's exactly what happened after the Civil War. Even though the British had switched to Egyptian cotton during the war due to unavailability of American cotton, they switched back when they could. By forcing African Americans into menial labor, slavery destroyed whatever other things they could have otherwise done (inventions, leadership, entrepreneurship, whatever), which harmed, not helped, the economy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 20 2022, @02:01AM
Sugar was never really a crop in America. The Caribbean and Brazil were where that crop was grown. Working on a sugar plantation had a much, much higher fatality rate than working in America picking cotton.